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Debian Weekly News - May 27, 2003

Welcome to this year's 21st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter
for the Debian community. The GNOME project [1]released their
unstable snapshot of GNOME (version 2.3.2) for testing. The
miniwoody CD, which offers a stripped down variant of Debian woody,
has been [2]renamed to [3]Bonzai Linux.

Donations Wishlist. Wouter Verhelst [4]proposed to create a
donations wishlist similar to the one FreeBSD developers
[5]maintain. The list requires people to state how they would use
the hardware. If someone works on something which is important to
someone elses business, a donation could be to the benefit of
both.

Proposal to remove Mosix. Francesco Lovergine [6]proposed to
remove all Mosix packages from the archive. Currently, Debian ships
both Mosix and OpenMosix. However, OpenMosix is more actively
maintained and even contains support for IA-64. It was forked off
of Mosix when Prof. Barak changed the license into a proprietary
one.

Packages with I18n Support disabled. Denis Barbier [7]compiled a
list of source packages that contain gettext files which are not
distributed in the corresponding binary packages. He will continue
to investigate these packages and file bug reports when
internationalisation (i18n) support is not enabled at build time or
if the translated files contain bugs that prevent the translation
from working.

Debian used on Pegasos Platform. Eugenia Loli-Queru [8]reported
that Debian GNU/Linux comes preinstalled on [9]Pegasos machines
which are based on the IBM/Motorola PowerPC G3 and G4 CPUs. Through
the use of Mac-On-Linux the Debian systems allows you to run MacOS
or OSX without requiring Apple hardware or a BIOS.

Interview with Andrew Tridgell. Alexander Antoniades was lucky
and [10]spoke with Andrew Tridgell about the pizzaware he created
which is called Samba. Andrew also revealed that he only uses two
GNU/Linux distributions regularly, Debian and Red Hat. However, he
prefers Debian and runs the unstable distribution on his
development machine, updating every couple of weeks.

Retain GCC Binary Compatibility? Matthias Klose [11]wondered if
it is worth striving for binary compatibility between hppa based
distributions. For GCC 3.3 [12]exceptions were changed from sjlj
based to dwarf2 based on hppa and m68k. Since there are no hppa or
m68k distributions released using gcc-3.2, compatibility with other
released distributions may not be an issue, though.

Maintaining the Kernel Source. The [13]discussion covers the
problems with too many kernel packages per architecture per
distribution. Manoj Srivastava [14]explained that there is a
mechanism to specify the order in which kernel-patches are applied
and that all architectures should only provide patch packages. By
consolidating the kernel source packages we should be able to
[15]shrink the distribution by one CD.

Hosting a DebConf in the U.S.? Aaron Ucko [16]wondered whether
an upcoming Debian Conference could be organised in the U.S. He
reports that a professor is interested in sponsoring a Debian
conference in Washington, DC, next spring, in conjunction with an
international conference on Open Source in government. Joe Drew
[17]added that there are a number of non-american developers who
will not set foot on American soil, due in part to the DMCA,
something Alan Cox [18]warned about already.

Firebird 0.6 packaged. Eric Dorland [19]announced that he has
uploaded packages of [20]Mozilla Firebird, formally known as
Phoenix, to his personal [21]apt repository. Eric plans to upload
this package to unstable after a few more tweaks, if there are no
objections. The packages don't conflict with the Phoenix packages
he provided earlier, since they were also unofficial packages.

Debian Multimedia List created. Marco Trevisani [22]announced
that the [23]debian-multimedia mailing list has been created by the
lists administrators. It intends to combine the efforts of [24]A
GNU/Linux Audio Distribution and Debian to create a GNU/Linux
distribution for professional audio users based upon Debian.

Debian Wiki back Online. Michael Ivey [25]announced that the
[26]Debian Wiki is back online, and should stay that way. He
experienced a lot of trouble with Zope on his tight server. He
finally [27]learned about Kwiki, which is written in Perl, and has
converted. All old links are still working with the help of
mod_rewrite.

NetBSD Kernel Package Policy. Joel Baker has resolved problems
with the libc on his Debian/NetBSD system and realized that if you
install a new libc on a system with an older kernel, the system may
end up in a hardly recoverable state. To address this he wrote a
mini [28]policy which documents a way to prevent this.

Donating Debian CDs to Libraries. Matthew Briggs [29]wondered if
it would be useful to donate his Debian CD collection to his
university library. However, libraries often use cataloging data to
keep track of their materials and this probably doesn't exist for
Debian CDs.

Debian powered autonomous Robots. The Inquirer [30]reported
about a team of scientists at [31]SRI International, a non-profit
research institute affiliated to the Stanford University, who are
working on robots that can perform tasks autonomously and report
findings back to a central controller. The camera on the robots
provide realtime feedback. The operating system controlling the
whole thing is Debian GNU/Linux.

W3C approves Patent Policy. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
has approved the W3C Patent [32]Policy based on review by the W3C
Advisory Committee. Tim Berners-Lee [33]explained the decision and
says that this policy discourages revenue generation strategies
that work by forcing standards-compliant applications to pay
licensing fees. However, the problem with a "royalty free" patent,
is that it can be sold to someone who then charges for it, which
happened to the JPEG patent, for example.

Debian Package Tags GUI. Enrico Zini [34]announced the new
[35]website for the Debian Package Tags system. He also created a
graphical user interface (GUI) for massive editing of the tag
database. This tagcolledit package has been uploaded into the
Debian archive and will be available in a couple of days.
Additionally Enrico created a [36]logo for Debian Package Tags.

All Systems Boot CD? Alastair McKinstry [37]wondered whether an
image could be created that would be the only necessary boot CD for
the 4 Debian kernel ports: GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd, GNU/NetBSD and
GNU/FreeBSD. Many of the "all" architecture packages overlap and it
should take less than 500 MB in total. This wouldn't happen in time
for the sarge release, but once all [38]issues are dealt with it
should be possible to build a single boot CD that will install a
working system using any of the 4 Debian systems.

Upcoming Keysigning Parties. Peter Palfrader is responsible for
the upcoming keysigning parties at [39]LinuxTag in Germany,
Karlsruhe, and [40]DebConf in Oslo, Norway. Gerfried Fuchs is also
organizing the keysigning party at [41]LinuxWochen in Vienna,
Austria. All parties will use the Zimmermann/Sassaman [42]method
and expect a lot of participants.

Priority of a Developer over a Non-Developer? Stefan Schwandter
[43]found himself without a Debian machine and had to orphan the
packages he maintained. Raphael Goulais [44]wondered whether the
Debian [45]policy says that a registered Debian developer has a
priority over a not (yet) registered developer when it comes to
package adoptions. Josip Rodin [46]explained that it is instead a
first-come-first-serve method.

More MIME Improvements to the BTS. Colin Watson [47]announced
that the web interface of the Bug Tracking System (BTS) decodes
each part of MIME messages for display. Quoted-printable and
base64-encoded text will be displayed in a readable form. In
addition, attachments are now only displayed as a download link
rather than as a download link plus the full encoded attachment.
The changes were also committed to the [48]CVS repository.

Debian Sub-Projects. Gustavo Franco [49]wondered why some Debian
sub-projects are listed on the official [50]website while others
aren't. Raphaël Hertzog [51]explained that this merely depends
on somebody dedicating time to write web pages. Ben Armstrong
[52]explained that [53]Debian Jr. is a personal subproject of his
within Debian, that received a lot of contribution by others.

Packages per Maintainer. Petter Reinholdtsen [54]reported that
he had discovered that the distribution of number of packages per
developer is very uneven. Very few developers maintain a lot
packages and a large number of developers maintain only a very
small number of packages, as the histogram reveals. He didn't
[55]honor other Debian work and Ben Collins even [56]said that
these numbers mean absolutely nothing.

What makes a DebConf a DebConf? Joe Drew [57]asked what criteria
a conference needs to meet until it can be called a DebConf. In
particularly he wondered, if the conference in the US ends up
happening will it be a DebConf or not. Andreas Schuldei [58]said
that he would like to see as many Debian meetings as possible.
David Harris [59]explained that people who can get expenses
reimbursed and sponsors need to have a focus and hence there should
only be major events called DebConf.

Orphaned Packages. 9 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 189 orphaned
packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed
to the Free Software community. Please see the [72]WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle
it to ITA: if you plan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this
newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who investigate
the Debian community and report about events in the community.
Please see the [91]contributing page to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at [92]dwn@debian.org.